From the monthly archives:

April 2007

Dialogue about JITSC, part 2: Open content models

by Pearlbear on April 9, 2007

This conversation is very interesting, and very useful.

Both Michael and Laura bring up some important points that I want to talk more about – the cost of providing good content, and ways to provide that good content in a way that is sustainable. There is no question that providing good content costs money – I have no illusions about that. And I do, very personally know that raising money in a traditional sense (from foundations, etc.) for producing content is difficult, and takes a lot of time. And I don’t think that we have all of the answers yet to solve this problem – but it’s a problem worth solving, a problem worth struggling with, and not just going down the path of least resistance.

I got on Michael’s case about this primarily because his journal is about technology and social change – and, as he had said, he’s made passionate arguments about the open content in the past. But ultimately, yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector should be freely available, and under Creative Commons (or similar) licensing. That’s the only way to provide important information to nonprofits that need it – some have a hard time affording even nominal fees for that sort of thing.

There are all sorts of interesting models for providing this content in this way, while still providing sustainability. Providing the online version as free and open, and charging for a print version (obviously, above and beyond just the cost of printing it,) is one idea. The open source community has all sorts of good models to learn from. Ways to leverage open content to get folks to pay for more premium services – in this realm it could be for training, or webinars, or those sorts of things. I think revenue sharing is possible – asking nonprofits who have resources to contribute to allow the content to be freely available to all, for instance. Michael’s open bounty is a great idea, and I’d love to help in any way I could to make that happen. There are collaborative content generation models – spreading the work out among more people. I also had heard of the publishing model that Peter brought up – allowing the authors to provide open access.

Believe me, between working with NOSI to provide good content, as well as thinking about what I am going to do with that science fiction novel I wrote over last summer that I’d like to publish at some point (I realized that once I started this conversation, I forever closed off the option to publish it traditionally) I feel this issue very keenly, and very, very personally.

I do want to address Laura’s concern about expectations. She says:

But I’ll put an unpopular suggestion out there: I think we as a community also need to consider possible negative impacts of advocating that all content ought to be open. It’s already very difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content; if in addition we promote in people’s mind the idea that all content ought to be free, it’s hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in which it’s very difficult to support good content into one in which it’s downright impossible.

It’s an interesting comment, and I think that it doesn’t take into consideration the way that gift economies work. A system where all content were freely available and under a Creative Commons license is a gift economy – in the same way as open source software, or wikipedia works in a gift economy. And there are great examples of sustainable gift economies out there, and ways that the “real” economy feeds gift economies. I think that it’s always important to make clear in people’s mind the difference between free “as in beer” and free as in “information wants to be free.” There is an educational component to providing free and open content. And I think we have to think about the negative impacts of providing content only to those who can pay for it – increasing an already evident digital divide between nonprofits that have the resources to pay for these kinds of content, and those that do not.

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NTC Summary, and Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0

by Pearlbear on April 8, 2007

As I write this, I’m hurtling through small towns and big cities on the train home. We’ve passed through Baltimore – which reminds me of a project I did once, way back when, to work with a group of mostly small and medium-sized organizations on technology planning. In those days, the buzzwords were “internet connectivity,” “networks,” “websites,” and “email.” This was in the solidly web 1.0 world where many organizations still weren’t even networked, still used dial-up internet connections, and had websites written in the earliest version of Front Page, or were done by the CFO’s nephew.

I’ve emerged from this week’s frenzy of buzzwords like “blogging,” “open API,” “e-advocacy,” “municipal wireless” and “social networking” not surprised at how much things have changed, really, but how much they have stayed exactly the same. From the stories I’ve heard this week, nonprofits of the size that I’m most familiar with (small to medium-sized) still don’t have in-house technology expertise to make evaluations about what directions to go in. They sometimes deal with vendors and developers that don’t really understand their mission, don’t speak their language, and don’t tell them the truth (whether intentionally, or by a lack of self-examination.) They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it’s free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. The buzzwords have changed and the technology has gotten more sophisticated – but the problems many nonprofits are facing are exactly the same. So I hate to throw cold water on the whole enterprise – but if the core issues that most nonprofits are facing haven’t changed, and the situation isn’t getting better, how is it that have we helped?

I also saw the conference with some different, post-seminary eyes. I was looking for the deeper purposes behind the implementation of technology. I was looking for the discriminating approach to adopt technology appropriately. I was looking for the big conversation – why are we doing this anyway? Is it still just in the pursuit of “efficiency”? Is it all just TCO arguments? And I also looked at this with post-implementation eyes. I spent 8 years implementing technology “solutions” for nonprofit organizations. I wrote thousands of lines of code and designed more databases than I can count. I think I truly did some good, and I know I made mistakes along the way. Mistakes I hope to learn from, now that I won’t be doing implementation anymore.

Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I’m riding on – inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up. And while they watch really large organizations zip by them in bigger, better vehicles, looking exactly like they know where they are going. But no one seems to be asking “why are we on this track in the first place?” “Is being on this track going to really help me save the whales/feed people/organize/save the planet?”

And it’s making me think a lot about what I’m going to start calling “Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0″ (and yes, I’m subverting the dominant paradigm.) I don’t know yet whether I’ll actually start practicing it, but I’d like to think about it more. What would it be like if we could help nonprofits with the following:

  • Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have they not?
  • Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale?
  • Asking, before implementing a new technology – what problem is really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways?
  • How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence, and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done face to face?
  • Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or feature set – but to bring in issues of the effects on staff, organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership of software, and environmental impact.
  • Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits – to look at issues that are technological, and issues that are about personality, behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides)
  • Looking at the bigger picture – how does what an organization does with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?

I’m looking for ways that it might be possible to practice nonprofit technology consulting with head and heart, with a view to the bigger picture of our society and our planet, and the precarious place we are in as human beings at this time, and with a view that reflects my emerging belief that increasing human touch and human contact will do more, in the end, than many of our attempts to increase efficiency by using technology.

When I re-started this blog 6 months ago, I named it Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology for a good reason. I want us to pay attention. I want us to pay attention to what we are doing, and how we are doing it. I’m very clear that there are technology implementations that are completely appropriate, mission-facilitating, and even good for the greater community, and good for the planet. I want to make sure that every single technology implementation is like that. My bet is that we might do a lot fewer of them if that were so.

As I keep thinking more about this, I’ll be blogging about it. I welcome any feedback and conversation, either by email, or on comments and trackbacks on this blog.

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How do we do make change if we keep doing things the same way?

by Pearlbear on April 7, 2007

I had heard about this new journal a while ago, and it was sitting in some small corner of my brain, waiting for me to pay attention. I ran into an old colleague at NTC, and it came up, because he had been thinking of contributing to the journal, but decided that he probably won’t, for reasons I will talk about.

The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, is, I think, a needed part of our landscape of resources for the sector. And the editors, both of whom I respect highly, are impeccable in their credentials to pull this sort of thing off, and make it successful.

But then I looked deeper. The journal is, basically, business as usual. It’s peer reviewed (good), but it’s got a rather restrictive license, and the content is not freely available. The licenses are as follows:

Personal License:

If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a personal license, this means that it is for your personal use. You may make copies for backup purposes or to allow you to personally use this report on more than one computer. You may also print copies, but not for circulation of any kind [emphasis mine].

Corporate License:

For most of you, we recommend a corporate license. If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a corporate license, this means that it is for use by people within your organization. You may make paper copies for internal circulation. You may post it to your intranet, so long as access to that intranet is restricted to those who work for your organization [emphasis mine].

In other words, don’t make a copies for a workshop, or for a colleague who isn’t inside your organization, and definitely don’t make a copy for your mother to read.

But it’s a journal about technology and social change! This goes back to my constant refrain – the means are the ends. How can we talk about technology in social change, while, at the same time, publishing in a format that limits the availability of this knowledge to people privileged enough to pay for it? How can we talk about promoting change when we’re not pushing this content into the commons?

The Public Library of Science is a wonderful example of a reputable, respected peer-reviewed journal where articles are freely available to the public. They say:

Published research results and ideas are the foundation for future progress in science and medicine. Open Access publishing therefore leads to wider dissemination of information and increased efficiency in science …

Which is, actually, a very practical down to earth argument. Benkler goes further, and I go with him:

Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development … More importantly, the availability of free information resources makes participating in the economy less dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity. [emphasis mine]

I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for how to do things differently – provide tools that foster social change in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the status quo.

I invited Michael Gilbert to a dialogue about this, which he readily agreed to. Below is his response. We’ll be continuing this on each of our blogs, with cross-linking. Please feel free to join the dialogue, either in comments, or on your own blog. I’ll respond to Michael’s response in another post.

Thank you so much for wanting to start a dialogue on this issue.

I would like to respond in three parts. First, I want to say a few words about my enthusiastic support for the critique of closed licensing offered by Michelle by reflecting a bit on my past actions in this regard. Second, I want to lay out as clearly as possible the circumstance that led to a decision to use a traditional closed license. Third, I want to invite people to participate in a conversation about how this could be done differently.

As anyone who has followed my advocacy work over the last ten years will know, I am a fervent supporter of open licensing models as a profound public good. I started promoting the Public Library of Science to the readers of Nonprofit Online News as far back as December of 2002. I’ve praised the innovation of the Creative Commons licenses on more than one occasion, along with Lawrence Lessig’s other work and ideas. (I have in fact offered a great deal of content under Creative Commons licenses in the past and will no doubt do so again.) I have been a champion of openness of all sorts, including such things as open licenses and the destructiveness of DRM, in panel after panel in the nonprofit tech community for a decade. I have more than once written challenges of others similar to Michelle’s challenge of me and I must say that I can only hope that I’ve been half as courteous as she has been.

Before I explain the circumstances that led to our licensing decision, I want to make one thing very clear. Although the Journal was prepared in partnership with NTEN, I take full and personal responsibility for the decision to use a closed license. Katrin Verclas (the Executive Director of NTEN, for those who don’t know) was eager to know if there was any way to make it open and pushed hard for it. I am the one who, with the interests of the sustainability of my own small organization in mind, refused.

The question of licensing is a terrible dilemma for authors, readers, reviewers and publishers right now and I happen to be all of the above. I’m in an absurd position, personally. I want our efforts to reach the broadest possible audience and at yet on a gut level, I loathe the restrictive nature of the journal industry. At the same time, I have a small organization with an established based of customers that will pay for high quality information. (In other words, I have paying subscribers who have been waiting for this journal for months.) Most importantly, I have staff to pay. Thus, the journal has a fee, although we’ve done our best to make the personal rate much lower than the organizational one and in no case are we anywhere near some of the stratospheric prices of many mainstream journals.

I’ve watched open journals fumble along and when they publish at all it’s the result of great sacrifice on the part of the people publishing it. Some, that have a home in the extra time that some academics can spend on such things in their jobs, are almost sustainable. Others aren’t at all. I’m really not sure what the answer is. The overhead of finding sponsors for a small publication is enormous. We experimented with it briefly two years ago when we first decided to publish a journal, but we couldn’t make it happen. Is there a business model that will make this work? I’m really not sure.

Quite frankly, nothing would please me more than to find a way to finance the expense of the journal without fees for licensed copies. The licensing is a pain for everyone. It’s friction in the system designed only to create some financial accountability for the work involved in nurturing the relationships involved and husbanding the papers into the best form we can manage. Maybe the answer is to abandon that and just use the Internet for direct publishing by authors, but I don’t think we’re far enough along yet in developing network centric models that do what competitive selection, peer review, and editing will do. Maybe the answer is for a single donor to step forward and fund the next half dozen issues. Maybe the answer is some kind of quarterly bounty which, as soon as financial pledges reach a certain amount, the publication goes to open license (or maybe that’s when the next issue is commenced). I really don’t know. If you want to help figure it out, I would be very grateful.

To wrap up, I just want to say thank you to Michelle for jumping on this right away. (I only wish you had been at the panel for the Journal on Friday where we talked about our larger goals. The licensing issue would have been a good piece of that discussion.) The sector benefits from this sort of criticism and we’ll all be better off for it.

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NTC Links

by Pearlbear on April 6, 2007

There has been a little bit of blogging and the like at NTC – although it was certainly hindered yesterday, when the internet was down for most of the day. And I think most of the bloggers are too busy giving, or going to sessions to blog much. But there are a few tidbits that I’ve enjoyed:

  • There is a great Flickr stream building up of photos tagged with “07NTC” including one of me.
  • Michael Gilbert has a review of things happening on the varied NTC backchannels, with some wry commentary.
  • Michael also has a really interesting map of the nonprofit technology space.
  • Yet Another Anonymous Nonprofit IT Staffer (hmmm, does it say something that with some regularity we discover blogs by folks who feel the need to be anonymous?) has great commentary about getting staff buy-in to technology projects: it’s the mission, stupid!
  • Charlie Brown, of Askoka’s Changemakers, says “It’s not about technology – its about appropriate technology… Its about human behavior… What do people actually need?” Yay, there are people who get it. I’m sorry I missed that session!

After it’s all said and done, I’ll post my overall review. But the next step is Penguin Day!

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Technology Consulting 2.0

by Pearlbear on April 4, 2007

I had a great Day of Service with the Advocacy Project, which is a great organization that sends interns out into the field, to work with local partner organizations on issues such as human rights, women’s health, peace, and many other issues. We talked about appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools for their interns, for themselves – for advocacy, fundraising, and information dissemination.

It was fun and engaging. They are an interesting and eclectic group, and our conversation ranged all over the map. But it felt useful, and I learned a lot from them. It made me think about what is important to me about consulting – why I got into doing consulting in the first place. I like talking with people. I like learning from them, I like working to give them concrete information they can use, as well as thought-provoking questions for them to ponder as time goes on.

And it reminded me of what I had been missing for all of this time in working to implement technology. It was the human contact, the human touch, the connection about more than just “can you fix this bug?” or “can you build this?” That’s what I’ve been missing.

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Going to DC …

by Pearlbear on April 2, 2007

Well, my bags are just about packed, I’ve prepared just about everything I can prepare. I’m involved in two sessions at NTC: the Linux Geekout on Thursday at 3:30, and the Case Studies in Open Source Software at 10:30 on Friday morning. I’m also facilitating two breakouts at Pengiun Day DC, one on Desktop Linux, and a second on starting open source projects.

It’s going to be an interesting NTC for me. This will be my first in three years (I missed the last two.) I’m going entirely with my NOSI hat on, and with a different perspective, since I’m not doing technology consulting. I’ll be thinking about open source, and about technology writing. I’ll get to see some old friends, and meet some new ones. Email me if you want to make sure we catch up.

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